When our soul is quiet our life is better and performance goes up. That makes sense on so many levels, intellectually, emotionally, even rationally. So, what are we to do to make sure that we can quiet the soul? Sounds like it should be easy, but alas, it feels like this one has a way of being problematic. Even our THPL journey can get us sideways from time to time. And so we work hard to pull it back in – yes quiet the soul. And as often as we do this and succeed we can find ourselves grappling with one of the most vexing of issues of life. And that is…..for some reason, not easy to explain, we consider too much, even if it is reluctantly, others input and feedback relating to our performance, and our lives. Why is it that we take feedback so personally? Is it that the “giver” of such feedback is qualified to give it? Or are we not as confident as we should be in our own decisions, our skills, our capabilities. But why? And really, who are these “other” people who can take us off our game with casual and often unfounded comments? I dare say that we need to think long and hard about allowing others to mess with our soul. We can seek feedback, consider it, use it – yes – but idle commentary with no basis, we should be impervious to such things.

And from that thought, we might decide to log one of our goals for 2015 – that is; to work actively to settle our soul. We can then feel good about our lives and live the mantra that when challenged we can make it personal but not take it personally. And then we might actually have set in place a pillar of improvement in our own performance and settled that beautiful soul.